Living a lifelong lie

Those Who Save Us is a conventional novel about coming to terms with the past

From facing-up to the legacy of the Nazis in Those Who Save Us to exploring the histroy of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male study in The Inner Circle, we give you a round-up of the latest book releases...

Anna is just 20 when she is forced to go into hiding in a small German town at the start of World War II. Her father has just turned in the Jewish doctor Anna was concealing; unbeknown to both men, Anna is also pregnant. Fifty years on, the fruit of that union is Trudy, a professor of German history at a US university, who believes herself to be the daughter of an SS officer. Anna - always a remote mother - has never put her right.

Blum's impressive debut, Those Who Save Us, is a conventional novel about coming to terms with the past made unusually interesting by its historical dimension. Trudy is trying to make her students appreciate the notion of moral relativity by encouraging them to empathise with the behaviour of ordinary Germans during the war; later, she embarks on a series of interviews with German eyewitnesses on living with the knowledge of the Holocaust. Intertwined is Anna's story and the choices she made in order for herself and Trudy to survive. Blum's novel has the readability of a saga but the weight of something more. Claire Allfree

Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's anti-hero narrator returns for another installment of sex and sweat Havana-style in
The Insatiable Spider Man. Following on from the Dirty Havana Trilogy and Tropical Animal, the ex-journalist and lothario considers the fact he's now 50 and married to a woman he can't even bear to kiss.

And when faced with the poverty that lurks behind Cuba's picture-postcard image, he loses himself in bad rum and lurid sex. Gutiérrez's ability to conjure up the seamy side of life and spot a joke in the grimmest situation remains undimmed but this novel adds little to what he's written before. Siobhan Murphy

Although he isn't named, the 'old man' in Chabon's
The Final Solution is unmistakably Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Approaching the end of his life like a hermit, he ignores the outside world until a mute boy and a parrot quoting German numbers appear on the South Downs, giving the old man one last chance to enjoy 'the world's beautiful refusal to yield up its mysteries without a fight'.

Having previously immersed himself in the world of comic book heroes for the Pulitzer prizewinning The Amazing Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay, Chabon tackles the 19th-century English detective story with great enthusiasm for archaic words such as parsimonious and extrapolations, which, along with the pencil-drawn illustrations, give this novella a pleasingly old-fashioned.Graeme Green

Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male revolutionised America's puritanical understanding of bedroom behaviour when it was published in 1948. Boyle chooses John Milk - a fictitious member of
The Inner Circle of Kinsey's researchers - to tell the story of that study, from the countless interviews on the sexual history of everyone from prostitutes to suburban teenagers, to society's inevitable objections.

Yet John's largely unquestioning complicity with Kinsey's methods and ideas produces a frustratingly passive account of an explosive topic: one looks in vain for provocative ideological and emotional tension between narrator and subject. Boyle's gift for extraordinary prose has also seemingly deserted him, his imagination the casualty of a narrative driven too heavily by facts.